Memory Lane 2000 Election Miami Dade Recount (Delay&Roberts)

[lovuian]

http://www.newsdissector.org/blog/2005/09/29/

Specifically, what role did Roberts play in the Bush campaign in 2000 in Florida, where 175,000 votes went uncounted? Was he part of the obstruction of the recount that was carried out by a small brigade of militant GOP protesters who had been organized by the just-indicted House GOP minority leader Tom DeLay? DeLay was known for "bare knuckles" politics that often "skirted the ethical edge," according to the Associated Press.

snip...

That decisive protest run by intensely partisan GOP staffers and Congressional aides was ordered by hard right-wing Republican Congressman John Sweeney to "shut it down," according to the Miami Herald's reporter. There were reports that UN Ambassador John Bolton was in that mob.

pictures of Roberts in the mob...

The images were taken from video shot inside the Miami Dade County building when GOP activists, led by propagandist Jim Wilkinson (later the head of the Coalition Media Center in Doha during the war, and media at the 2004 GOP convention in New York), stormed the recount. They aimed to stop it with a disruptive protest, charging "voter fraud. " They claimed, but could not prove, that the Miami election commissioners were stealing votes for Al Gore -- who most observers believe would have won the election if all the votes had been properly counted.

This sordid story and the video appear in Counting on Democracy, the film I directed on the 2000 election.

www.globalvision.org

Democrats later denounced the noisy demo as possibly illegal, and certainly over the ethical edge, because it intimidated county officials who later stopped the recount
more...

Delay did his job Bolton and Roberts too... followed by the US SUPREME COURT
handing our country to a bunch of crooks... History will be cruel to them...

[RagingInMiami]

1. That sure as hell looks like Roberts in that photo

[Wilms]

2. Great Article

snip

The Miami Herald has acknowledged:

"The role of U.S. Supreme Court nominee John Roberts in the 2000 election aftermath in Florida was larger than has been reported.

U.S. Supreme Court nominee John Roberts played a broader behind-the-scenes role for the Republican camp in the aftermath of the 2000 election than previously reported -- as legal consultant, lawsuit editor and prep coach for arguments before the nation's highest court, according to the man who drafted him for the job.

Ted Cruz, a domestic policy advisor for President Bush and who is now Texas' solicitor general, said Roberts was one of the first names he thought of while he and another attorney drafted the Republican legal dream team of litigation ''lions'' and ''800-pound gorillas,'' which ultimately consisted of 400 attorneys in Florida."

snip

[Wilms]

3. A Chat with Lance deHaven-Smith: Al Gore really did beat George W. Bush

From Research in Review Magazine, Florida State University, Fall/Winter 2005:

Battlefield Florida

A Chat with Lance deHaven-Smith

Al Gore really did beat George W. Bush in 2000. Six years on, this is still a problem?

by Julian Pecquet

snip

RinR: One of the most interesting points you make in the book is that the focus on undervotes (ballots containing no vote for president)—the hanging, dimpled and otherwise pregnant chads—was misplaced. Instead, you explain that a study by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, which looked at all the ballots that were initially rejected on election night 2000, revealed a surprise: most of these uncounted votes were in fact discarded because they were over-votes, instances of two votes for president on one ballot. What do you think the NORC study tells us about the election?

LdHS: It’s an embarrassing outcome for George Bush because it showed that Gore had gotten more votes. Everybody had thought that the chads were where all the bad ballots were, but it turned out that the ones that were the most decisive were write-in ballots where people would check Gore and write Gore in, and the machine kicked those out. There were 175,000 votes overall that were so-called “spoiled ballots.” About two-thirds of the spoiled ballots were over-votes; many or most of them would have been write-in over-votes, where people had punched and written in a candidate’s name. And nobody looked at this, not even the Florida Supreme Court in the last decision it made requiring a statewide recount. Nobody had thought about it except Judge Terry Lewis, who was overseeing the statewide recount when it was halted by the U.S. Supreme Court. The write-in over-votes have really not gotten much attention. Those votes are not ambiguous. When you see Gore picked and then Gore written in, there’s not a question in your mind who this person was voting for. When you go through those, they’re unambiguous: Bush got some of those votes, but they were overwhelmingly for Gore. For example, in an analysis of the 2.7 million votes that had been cast in Florida’s eight largest counties, The Washington Post found that Gore’s name was punched on 46,000 of the over-vote ballots it, while Bush’s name was marked on only 17,000.

snip

RinR: So, what’s the overarching theme of The Battle for Florida?

LdHS: It really tells a simple story in some ways. It essentially says that the people responsible for administering the election had a conflict of interest and that they, in a variety of ways, prevented the recount from being conducted.

I go into explaining…why would it operate like this? One factor that drove it this way is essentially that the Republicans are on the losing side of a huge demographic trend in this state: an increasing minority population. And they know this—it’s not a secret. One reason there was administrative sabotage of the recount was because a number of steps had already been taken to try to lock in the Republican control of Florida in the face of these demographics that are running in the other direction. The other thing the book looks at, in addition to the long history leading up to this event, is also what came out afterwards, what was done, were problems corrected, what investigations were conducted? And the story there is, gee, there was really very little investigation, amazingly little, given the importance of the election and the controversy. Frankly, I would never have written this book had there been any careful investigation done afterwards. That was what shook me after the election, I was expecting people would go into it, find out what had happened and straighten out the problems so it wouldn’t happen again.

snip

http://www.research.fsu.edu/researchr/winter2005/features/battlefield.html


Discussion

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